If Orthogonal wants to ever be taken seriously, by far the most important thing is improving the public-facing communication. I invested a more-than-fair amount of time (given the strong prior for “it won’t work” with no author credentials, proof-of-concepts, or anything that would quickly nudge that prior) trying to understand QACI, and why it’s not just gibberish (both through reading LW posts and interacting with authors/contributors on the discord server), and I’m still mostly convinced there is absolutely nothing of value in this direction.
And now there’s this 10k-word-long post, roughly the size of an actual research paper, with no early indication that there’s any value to be obtained by reading the whole thing. I know, I’m “telling on myself” by commenting without reading this post, but y’all rarely get any significant comments on LW posts about QACI (as this post points out), and this might be the reason.
The way I see it, the whole thing has the impressive balance of being extremely hand-wavy as a whole, written up in an extremely “chill and down with the kids” manner, with bits and pieces of math sprinkled in various places, often done incorrectly.
Maybe the general academic formalism isn’t the worst thing after all—you need an elevator pitch, an abstract, something to read in a minute or two that will give the general idea of what’s going on. Then an introduction, expanding on those ideas and providing some more context. And then the rest of the damn research (which I know is in a very early stage and preparadigmatic and all that—but that’s not an excuse for bad communication)
If Orthogonal wants to ever be taken seriously, by far the most important thing is improving the public-facing communication. I invested a more-than-fair amount of time (given the strong prior for “it won’t work” with no author credentials, proof-of-concepts, or anything that would quickly nudge that prior) trying to understand QACI, and why it’s not just gibberish (both through reading LW posts and interacting with authors/contributors on the discord server), and I’m still mostly convinced there is absolutely nothing of value in this direction.
And now there’s this 10k-word-long post, roughly the size of an actual research paper, with no early indication that there’s any value to be obtained by reading the whole thing. I know, I’m “telling on myself” by commenting without reading this post, but y’all rarely get any significant comments on LW posts about QACI (as this post points out), and this might be the reason.
The way I see it, the whole thing has the impressive balance of being extremely hand-wavy as a whole, written up in an extremely “chill and down with the kids” manner, with bits and pieces of math sprinkled in various places, often done incorrectly.
Maybe the general academic formalism isn’t the worst thing after all—you need an elevator pitch, an abstract, something to read in a minute or two that will give the general idea of what’s going on. Then an introduction, expanding on those ideas and providing some more context. And then the rest of the damn research (which I know is in a very early stage and preparadigmatic and all that—but that’s not an excuse for bad communication)